I'm so glad that you have found my blog. Its main purpose is to provide items of interest to orthodox Anglicans who love the Gospel of Jesus, believe the Catholic Faith, yearn for the Church's unity and work for the evangelisation of the world. God bless you.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

This is the sixth and final instalment of John Hazlewood's lecture on the Caroline Divines, given to the Institute of Spiritual Studies at St Peter's Eastern Hill in 1982. It was included in a book published by the Institute, Anglican Spirituality.

John Hazlewood on The Caroline Divines

Part 6: Nicholas Ferrar

Ferrar had been a close friend of George Herbert. He had also
been successful in the secular world of London after a brilliant career
at Cambridge. He had joined the Virginia Company and entered the
Parliament to further its missionary interests. These were all dashed
to pieces in the 1624 Parliament, and at the urging of Laud, the great
archbishop who had also successfully urged Herbert to accept
Bemerton, he was ordained deacon.

He was presented with the manor and living of Little Gidding in
1625. After some months of making the manor house and the small
church habitable he went there with his family. About thirty people
in all, and set up a new kind of religious community. Most of his
work perished when the Puritans visited and destroyed it in 1646.
He wrote the first preface to Herbert's "The Temple" and he put
forward in his community the ideals of his friend. The Prayer Book
offices with a monthly Communion. Confessions and absolution.
Stories by which he delighted to teach the same doctrines as the great
Carolines had espoused. Charles I visited them three times but
Nicholas had died in 1637.

Here was a development in the spiritual
and community life almost unique in its day but interestingly enough
beginning again in our own. They were not always at prayer. There
were games, stories, spiritual discussions, charitable work amongst
the poor and the making of beautiful books. Here was a community
dedicated to the whole seven days of Herbert's poem but they were
too allied to the King and to what was supposed to be Roman, and
their heroic attempt was finally destroyed even as Charles the King
was being betrayed and prepared for his scaffold.

The influence of the Caroline Divines was immense although in
the middle of its bloom much of what it stood for was thrust down
into Presbyterian and Dictatorial Government.

There was a true
resurrection experience for those who survived when both King and
Episcopate were restored in 1661. There was a frightful schism as the
non-jurors moved out after the flight of James II.

Nevertheless their
type of spirituality delighted in God's creation, fled the evils of sin,
rejoiced in the sensitivity of music, art and reverence. It was firmly
strong in the Liturgy and generous in good works. The strong
foundations of prayer always and everywhere were left to the Church
and are still aimed at and pursued this day. People as diverse as
Martin the missionary, the Wesleys, John Keble, Edward King are
evidences of this heritage. The contemporary spiritual writer Alan
Jones is one today as is Father Bryant of Cowley whose new book
about the soul's journey finds itself built around the structure of a
poem of George Herbert.

The great twentieth century poet T. S. Eliot ends this paper.

"If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and motion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of living,
Here the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always." ("Little Gidding", last of the "Four Quartets", 1944)